Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can\'t Stop Talking pdfdrive com

mumble,
mumble, mumble
, I’ll go hiking.”
“My impression of you,” Professor Ni told Raj gently, “is that I can
give you a lot of work to do, but I don’t have to pay much attention to
you. Remember, in Silicon Valley, you can be the smartest, most capable
person, but if you can’t express yourself aside from showing your work,
you’ll be underappreciated. Many foreign-born professionals experience
this; you’re a glorified laborer instead of a leader.”
The class nodded sympathetically.
“But there’s a way to be yourself,” continued Ni, “and to let more of
you come out through your voice. Many Asians use only a narrow set of
muscles when they speak. So we’ll start with breathing.”

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With that, he directed Raj to lie on his back and vocalize the five
American English vowels. “A … E … U … O … I …” intoned Raj, his
voice floating up from the classroom floor. “A … E … U … O … I …
A … E … U … O … I …”
Finally Professor Ni deemed Raj ready to stand up again.
“Now, what interesting things do you have planned for after class?” he
asked, clapping his hands encouragingly.
“Tonight I’m going to a friend’s place for dinner, and tomorrow I’m
going hiking with another friend.” Raj’s voice was louder than before,
and the class applauded with gusto.
The professor himself is a role model for what can happen when you
work at it. After class, I visited him in his office, and he told me how shy
he’d been when he first came to the United States—how he put himself
in situations, like summer camp and business school, where he could
practice acting extroverted until it came more naturally. These days he
has a successful consulting practice, with clients that include Yahoo!,
Visa, and Microsoft, teaching some of the same skills he labored to
acquire himself.
But when we began talking about Asian concepts of “soft power”—
what Ni calls leadership “by water rather than by fire”—I started to see a
side of him that was less impressed by Western styles of communication.
“In Asian cultures,” Ni said, “there’s often a subtle way to get what you
want. It’s not always aggressive, but it can be very determined and very
skillful. In the end, much is achieved because of it. Aggressive power
beats you up; soft power wins you over.”
I asked the professor for real-life examples of soft power, and his eyes
shone as he told me of clients whose strength lay in their ideas and
heart. Many of these people were organizers of employee groups—
women’s groups, diversity groups—who had managed to rally people to
their cause through conviction rather than dynamism. He also talked
about groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving—clusters of people
who change lives through the power not of their charisma but of their
caring. Their communication skills are sufficient to convey their
message, but their real strength comes from substance.
“In the long run,” said Ni, “if the idea is good, people shift. If the
cause is just and you put heart into it, it’s almost a universal law: you
will attract people who want to share your cause. Soft power is quiet

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persistence. The people I’m thinking of are very persistent in their day-
to-day, person-to-person interactions. Eventually they build up a team.”
Soft power, said Ni, was wielded by people we’ve admired throughout
history: Mother Teresa, the Buddha, Gandhi.
I was struck when Ni mentioned Gandhi. I had asked almost all the
Cupertino high school students I met to name a leader they admired, and
many had named Gandhi. What was it about him that inspired them so?
Gandhi was, according to his autobiography, a constitutionally shy and
quiet man. As a child, he was afraid of everything: thieves, ghosts,
snakes, the dark, and especially other people. He buried himself in books
and ran home from school as soon as it was over, for fear of having to
talk to anybody. Even as a young man, when he was elected to his first
leadership position as a member of the Executive Committee of the
Vegetarian Society, he attended every meeting, but was too shy to speak.
“You talk to me quite all right,” one of the members asked him,
confused, “but why is it that you never open your lips at a committee
meeting? You are a drone.” When a political struggle occurred on the
committee, Gandhi had firm opinions, but was too scared to voice them.
He wrote his thoughts down, intending to read them aloud at a meeting.
But in the end he was too cowed even to do that.
Gandhi learned over time to manage his shyness, but he never really
overcame it. He couldn’t speak extemporaneously; he avoided making
speeches whenever possible. Even in his later years, he wrote, “I do not
think I could or would even be inclined to keep a meeting of friends
engaged in talk.”
But with his shyness came his unique brand of strength—a form of
restraint best understood by examining little known corners of Gandhi’s
life story. As a young man he decided to travel to England to study law,
against the wishes of the leaders of his Modhi Bania subcaste. Caste
members were forbidden to eat meat, and the leaders believed that
vegetarianism was impossible in England. But Gandhi had already
vowed to his beloved mother to abstain from meat, so he saw no danger
in the trip. He said as much to the Sheth, the headman of the

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community.
“Will you disregard the orders of the caste?” demanded the Sheth.
“I am really helpless,” replied Gandhi. “I think the caste should not
interfere in the matter.”
Boom! He was excommunicated—a judgment that remained in force
even when he returned from England several years later with the
promise of success that attended a young, English-speaking lawyer. The
community was divided over how to handle him. One camp embraced
him; the other cast him out. This meant that Gandhi was not allowed
even to eat or drink at the homes of fellow subcaste members, including
his own sister and his mother-and father-in-law.
Another man, Gandhi knew, would protest for readmission. But he
couldn’t see the point. He knew that fighting would only generate
retaliation. Instead he followed the Sheth’s wishes and kept at a
distance, even from his own family. His sister and in-laws were prepared
to host him at their homes in secret, but he turned them down.
The result of this compliance? The subcaste not only stopped
bothering him, but its members—including those who had
excommunicated him—helped in his later political work, without
expecting anything in return. They treated him with affection and
generosity. “It is my conviction,” Gandhi wrote later, “that all these good
things are due to my non-resistance. Had I agitated for being admitted to
the caste, had I attempted to divide it into more camps, had I provoked
the castemen, they would surely have retaliated, and instead of steering
clear of the storm, I should, on arrival from England, have found myself
in a whirlpool of agitation.”
This pattern—the decision to accept what another man would
challenge—occurred again and again in Gandhi’s life. As a young lawyer
in South Africa, he applied for admission to the local bar. The Law
Society didn’t want Indian members, and tried to thwart his application
by requiring an original copy of a certificate that was on file in the
Bombay High Court and therefore inaccessible. Gandhi was enraged; he
knew well that the true reason for these barriers was discrimination. But
he didn’t let his feelings show. Instead he negotiated patiently, until the
Law Society agreed to accept an affidavit from a local dignitary.
The day arrived when he stood to take the oath, at which point the
chief justice ordered him to take off his turban. Gandhi saw his true

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limitations then. He knew that resistance would be justified, but believed
in picking his battles, so he took off his headgear. His friends were upset.
They said he was weak, that he should have stood up for his beliefs. But
Gandhi felt that he had learned “to appreciate the beauty of
compromise.”
If I told you these stories without mentioning Gandhi’s name and later
achievements, you might view him as a deeply passive man. And in the
West, passivity is a transgression. To be “passive,” according to the
Merriam-Webster Dictionary, means to be “acted upon by an external
agency.” It also means to be “submissive.” Gandhi himself ultimately
rejected the phrase “passive resistance,” which he associated with
weakness, preferring